By MARIANNE MEANS, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, May 18, 2005

WASHINGTON-- Conservative Republicans on a House Armed Services subcommittee recently thumbed their noses at women in uniform with a party-line vote to forbid them from serving in combat support units.

The problem in today's ground warfare, however, is that gunfire and bombs are all around our military in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no clear front line and no way to assure that female soldiers in the field can be kept out of danger from enemy attack.

The House dredged up an outdated insult to female patriotism that bears little relation to reality. But it has the political punch of appealing to social conservatives, who view women as fragile flowers, best suited for tending to men and bearing babies.

Despite years of tiresome arguments that the fair sex is too weak to fight, would distract male soldiers and cost lives, women have been playing ever-larger roles in the military.

Even though one-third of the positions in the Army and Marines are closed to women, female recruits now make up 15 percent of the armed forces. They account for about 2 percent of the dead. [Editor's Note: The original version of this column overstated the percentage of women military personnel serving in Iraq who have been killed since the war began.]

Nineteen thousand women currently serve in Iraq; 35 have have been killed there, more than 300 wounded.

The military's top brass is not behind this incredibly stupid congressional move. What were the Republicans thinking?

The service of women in the military is not a leftish social experiment. Women have proven their value on the battlefield. Just ask the military. Army leaders wrote Congress in protest, saying women are performing "magnificently" in a wide range of wartime duties.

Other Army officers, whose service would be most heavily impacted, have noted that the changes would cause confusion in the ranks and send the wrong signal to young men as well as women.

If the new prohibition passes the full House and Senate, many jobs and promotions will be closed off and it will become more difficult to lure women into the military. Yet recruitment numbers are falling so rapidly Maj. Gen Michael Rochelle, the Army's chief recruiter, predicted that next year would be the toughest for recruiting since the all-volunteer force began in 1973. So why do politicians want to drive away a substantial portion of the potential recruitment pool?

The subcommittee added its new restrictions without advance notice, without hearings or new studies and with little discussion. The minority Democrats, as usual these days, were blindsided by the sudden GOP move.

The measure's chief backers couldn't even explain what their problem was. The Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., pressed subcommittee chairman Rep John McHugh, R-N.Y., to introduce it at the last minute. Hunter issued a statement saying that "The American people have never wanted to have women in combat and this reaffirms that policy."

Horsefeathers. Women aren't enrolled in the military academies and military prep schools for the purpose of sitting behind desks. The courts said it would be discriminatory to keep them out, and that development has been accepted by the public at large.

They are training to be warriors, and the job of warriors is to fight.

This amendment isn't about combat anyway. To the degree you can define combat in the world of modern guerilla warfare, that's still officially off limits. It's just another attempt to keep women out of important positions in a field traditionally dominated by men.

There has been no public outcry over the fact women as well as men are being killed in the war zone. There is much concern about war casualties in general but no indication that Americans are more upset about risks for women than risks for men. This is, remember, a volunteer Army. Nobody's son or daughter was conscripted against his or her will.

The committee's ranking member, Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., complained that this idiotic measure was revisiting an old argument that had been settled long ago.

"We had this debate more than 20 years ago" he said. "Many in Congress, including myself, were concerned about the ability of women to serve in a variety of front line missions. Based on the exceptional performance of our women service members, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, I no longer have those concerns."

The military brass doesn't have those concerns, either. I hope common sense will prevail and the amendment be allowed to die. Only the House Republicans are stuck in a time warp of male misconceptions about the skills and courage of U.S. servicewomen.